Earthquakes? Blame Detroit SUVs ( The Michigan View 08.24.11)

Posted by hpayne on August 24, 2011

Will Washington’s Green Church blame the D.C. earthquake on global warming?

Don’t laugh. Determined to perpetuate a state of fear to squeeze more money from Big Auto and Big Utility to combat the non-Apocalypse, the warmers have teamed up with Big Insurance to blame teutonic plate disasters like the Japanese earthquake on climate change.

“Politicians might not believe in climate change, but insurance companies do,” reports Grist.com. “They track disasters, and it turns out that disasters just in the first six months of this year already cost the world more than any other year of disasters on record. The price tag for 2011 disasters reached $265 billion. Most of that cost ($210 billion) came from the tsunami in Japan.”

We’re not making this stuff up.

The insurance industry has been on this bandwagon since 2008 when an industry study found global warming “the greatest strategic risk currently facing the property/casualty insurance industry.”

By linking all natural disasters from tornadoes to earthquakes to “man-made” global warming, Big Insurance opens up a whole new list if litigants to sue for disasters which otherwise put huge holes in the industry’s bottom line.

Earthquake damage in DC? Blame it on the auto industry production of SUVs.

Hurricane damage? Sue the utility industry for coal plants.

Pols have been quick to sign on to this absurdity. On the very day the 8.9 earthquake struck Japan, the president of the European Union’s Economic and Social Committee said in a statement:

The earthquake and tsunami will clearly have a severe impact on the economic and social activities of the region. Some islands affected by climate change have been hit. Has not the time come to demonstrate on solidarity — not least solidarity in combating and adapting to climate change and global warming? Mother Nature has again given us a sign that that is what we need to do.

Even some green pews blanched at this shameless distortion of science. “Huh? Japan sits astride a subduction zone,” wrote the Washington Post’s lefty Stephen Stromberg, “where one tectonic plate plunges below another into the Earth’s mantle. Consequently, you get big earthquakes there.”

But for a movement led by charlatans like Senator Debbie “I can feel global warming when I fly” Stabenow and climatologist James “Coal trains are like Nazi Holocaust trains” Hansen, this kind of nonsense is too profitable to ignore.

Playing on people’s ignorance by giving them an auto company scapegoat for earthquakes, hurricanes, and other freaks of nature opens the gates for massive damage suits that will make the tobacco settlement (now pouring millions into a state government treasury near you) look like a piker.